Introduction and background

The Danish Building Defects Fund is one of the primary sources of information on the building quality of Danish housing built in the past 20-25 years.

The information is available in the Fund's extensive database. The database includes all information collected from our systematic year-five building inspections, which were established in 1991. After 1998 a year-one building inspection was established, and the information collected here is also stored in our database. The Fund has carried out inspections on all 10.500 publicly subsidised housing associations, which have received public housing subsidies since July 1986 - comprising some 210.000 dwellings in all.

The building inspections, by use of random sampling, register all deficiencies[1] and damages[2]; be they material, or construction- and building elements, which fail to comply with public rules and stipulations, good building ethics and practice (craftsmanship) or agreements. 

Major deficiencies due to problems in the initial building process may later lead to building damages; for example breakage, leakage, deformation, weakening or ruining of the building. Since 1991 more than 3.500 building defects have been claimed, and information on the different types of claims, is also stored in our database.

General information

The Danish Building Defects Fund is a privately owned institution, which was established by law in 1986 (The Law on Public Housing), as part of a quality and liability reform that same year. The background for the reform was the extensive damages to concrete and flat-topped housing built in the 1960s and 1970s.

The reform introduced the following requirements:

• Quality assurance in all public building and in publicly subsidised housing
• Prospects for the operation, servicing and maintenance of the housing schemes.
• The use of standard agreements between the contractor on the one hand and the client or builder, entrepreneur or building company on the other, with the purpose of making liability clear and well-defined.
• Standardised and homogenised liability rules covering the first five years.

Since 1979, technical consultancy liability only applied the first five years, while contractor's liability applied for twenty years and the supplier's liability only one year.

As a further consequence of the reform, The Danish Building Defects Fund was established, and since July 1^st 1986, 1% of the initial construction expenses for all publicly subsidised housing schemes have been paid to the Fund. The Fund is able to finance building damage repairs also by raising loans mortgaging the involved housing estates.